Just when you thought the fantastical movies churned out by the Bollywood film industry couldn’t get any stranger, Shahrukh Khan stars in My Name is Khan. The movie, directed by Karan Johar (and starring Kajol, naturally), is set to be released this winter and casts Khan as a Muslim man with Asperger syndrome who comes to post-9-11 America only to be detained by authorities for suspicious behavior. Oh yeah, and then he goes on a quest to meet President Barack Obama (played by Christopher B. Duncan from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno) in the hopes of clearing his name. Continue reading →

Global Bollywood is an academic anthology, but it contains several essays that might be of interest to lay readers who are fans of Hindi films and filmi music. There are, admittedly, a couple of somewhat jargony essays in the collection, but they can be avoided for readers allergic to that sort of thing. Accessible essays that take on specific subjects, and present new and helpful information about them, dominate the anthology. As a result, I can recommend it alongside another book I reviewed some time ago, Tejaswini Ganti’s Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema.

Defining “Bollywood”

Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti’s thorough introduction to this volume is a pretty definitive survey of much important scholarship on Hindi cinema. Given my own background and interests, the sections from which I learned the most were probably the somewhat more ‘marginal’ sections, where Gopal and Moorti provided overviews of some slightly more obscure topics, such as the influence of 19th century Parsi street theater on the emergence of the Bollywood acting and musical style (they cite Kathryn Hansen’s work on this subject; also see Hansen’s translation of Somnath Gupt’s book).

Still, here is the definition of “Bollywood” with which Gopal and Moorti begin:

Frequently remarked upon by insiders and always remarkable to outsiders, song-dance occupies the constitutive limit of Bollywood cinema. It determines – perhaps unfairly but invariably – the form itself even as it frequently escapes the filmic context to inhabit other milieus. (1)

One could object that it’s not just the song-dance that is distinctive about commercial Hindi cinema, but the particular stylization of the acting, which seems over-the-top and melodramatic to many viewers acculturated to the values of European art cinema. Certainly, it wasn’t just song-dance that Satyajit Ray rebelled against starting in the 1950s – or, more recently, Aparna Sen, or Mira Nair. These art film directors were also interested in more naturalistic characterization, and in finding beauty in the everyday. Continue reading →

Since my son was born two and a half years ago, I have pretty much given up on staying current on Indian cinema. It’s difficult to get out to the movies, and our local Indian store really doesn’t seem to have a very good collection of stuff. I saw more Indian movies on the plane from Mumbai to Newark in January than I probably did in all of 2008.

On a recent day-trip to New York, we picked up two DVDs of what might be termed “anti-Bollywood” Hindi films that might get us back in the habit, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, and Luck By Chance.

By anti-Bollywood, I mean films that try to be “realistic” rather than sentimental, and that have limited use of songs to accompany, rather than interrupt, the plot of the film (the “diegesis,” for you film geeks). Many conventional Bollywood films don’t have written scripts, and star-power, branding, and memorable songs often have more to do with the success of those films than acting skill, or good, believable stories. In the old days, the emphasis on realism in Indian cinema was mainly the province of art-house directors, and mainly involved glum themes and a certain ponderousness. Happily, in the past few years, with the rise of Indian multiplexes, a realist sensibility has started to take hold on the margins of Bollywood itself. To my eye, the movement started with gangster films, and directors like R.G. Varma. But now it seems like we’re increasingly seeing a broader range of themes and styles of filmmaking in this space: an anti-Bollywood Bollywood. (Meanwhile, the same-old same-old of Hindi commercial cinema sputters along, effectively unchanged.)

Below are my brief reviews of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Luck by Chance. Continue reading →

Tonight, I’ll be trying something a little different in the bunker.

Instead of live-blogging the Academy Awards the way I might have in the past, via a disjointed, half-kundi’d sort of list, I’m going to use the nifty program you see below. If it’s good enough for Sports blog Ball Don’t Lie, it’s good enough for this fellow fan o‘ Sheed:

What’s great about this is…well…everything. I can put up instant polls, pick out comments from you to publish in the stream of live blogging, and then tie it up at the end in to a lovely little package with a “replay” ribbon on top, so all may enjoy it at their leisure. I played with it on my own blog, here, so that’s what the finished product will look like. I’m excited, about this and whatever else may come. Are you? 🙂

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I will also be one of many, many people participating in SAJA’s post-Oscars Call-in Web Radio Show Thing tonight. Continue reading →